Given by today's leading historian on modern China, Professor Frank Dikötter, 'The Chancellor's Lecture’ will enthral and shock in equal measure.

Dikötter has drawn on newly opened party archives, secret police reports, interviews and memoirs to trace the history of modern China from the hoisting of the red flag over Beijing’s Forbidden City by Mao Zedong in 1949, through the great famine that saw 45 million Chinese worked, starved or beaten to death, to the brutal purges of the Cultural Revolution.